> his actions make it clear

I haven't seen any actions where he has prevented people from discussions on the platform within the laws of the United States.

They literally banned journalists reporting on his plane, easily gave in to the Turkish government, tried to ban links to other platforms, etc.

It's okay to support someone, but at least do it without filtering out everything that doesn't fit your narrative.

For the Turkish Gov thing, I should've specified US citizens on US Soil. The argument he claims is that a country can decide how they want to operate businesses inside their own borders. Twitter must comply. Its better to be allowed to operate in another country than be kicked out and have another more government subservient tech company replacement step in. If you believe otherwise, I think I would need to hear a strong argument that its the better alternative.

If someone is one of the most highly influential people on the planet managing gigantic marketcap companies like Tesla/Spacex, It makes sense from a personal safety standpoint not to dox their location each time they travel. Doxing people fits whose narrative again? I'm not convinced thats a 'narrative'.

Banning links to substack was temporary. Substack released a competitor and was scraping their contact data. https://www.theguardian.com/media/2023/apr/11/row-between-tw.... How would you handle the situation where you have a company losing money and competitors are sucking your data dry?

Scraping contact data in what way? Letting a user trigger some requests when they're moving between sites shouldn't be a problem at all.

But either way, that's not a reason to block links, and them being a competitor is not a reason to block links.

In regards to scraping users from the platform your moving away from, Facebook did the exact same thing to twitter in 2013. The veterans running these companies know the playbooks. https://twitter.com/TechEmails/status/1650894515702763521

Its naive that people sit on the sidelines opining they should've done the opposite when all the evidence points to blocking scraping as a standard business practice (and scraping is illegal if the company forbids it in their policy). Most people saying otherwise have not run a company or startup in a competitive environment where every other player wants to steal their lunch.

If someone is crawling your content, that's usually bad behavior.

If a user signs up somewhere else, and wants their data to be ported over, there is very little to legitimately complain about. Even more so when the scraping is just contact data for that user, because that's very little server load.

Go away with this "steal their lunch" stuff. It should be legally mandated that users can transfer contacts between services.

Also blocking API access is very different from blocking user-posted links.

1. Wikipedia had the same issue with the Turkish government, fought it in Turkish courts and won. Twitter bent over and used the "but another even worse app will take our place" excuse you're using here. They're not helping free speech here.

2. Flight data is public, no one is doxing anyone. The incident Musk used as proof that this was bad was while he was in a car... far from his plane.

3. Twitter banned Mastodon links before Substack. Was Mastodon scraping Twitter's contact data too?

You see, the problem is not even what he's doing with Twitter. It's his company, who cares? It's claiming that Twitter is the internet's "town square" and that he is anti-censorship, while restricting access to the platform and censoring content. It's complete bullshit and people like you fall for it and even defend it.

I'd respect Elon Musk more if he came out and just said "this is my platform, I'll ban stuff that affects me or affects my revenue, get out if you're not happy." Instead, he says one thing and does another.